Pixel Art Details

This creature, simply named "Vultus horrificus" (terrifying face) by the few survivors of colony L-17M7B, lurks for incautious prey roughly 1-2 metres under the ice. Not much is known of its anatomy or behaviour, but judging from the bite marks of its victims the head must be around 87-95 centimetres in width. ...

Used a some weird Nurgle daemon minature as ref. Papa Nurgle protects.

Palette:

Was aiming for a mostly cool-coloured palette with a warm shadow.

Edit:

I'm very surprised by the attention this piece has received, and I'm quite amazed by all the faves and points given. Thank you very, very much for voting! :)

Thank you, Bob! I really appreciate you taking the time and writing a comment like this!

I've never done that. Very interesting indeed, but can't read it either. There isn't much vocabulary left from my school days. ;)

Version 1 had a much darker border and looked a bit weird. I felt the upper right spot needed something in order to get a more harmonic composition. Glad you like it.

You are right, breaking through thick ice head first requires something a bit harder than flesh and a tiny jaw. A horn would be ideal, but very hard to make readable without sacrificing most of the face. More of a designe choice, luckily the ref miniature had all of this already... can't find the pic anymore unfortunately. :(

I keep searching though! ;)

That would be horrible, and twice as bad for a good kisser!

Thanks again! I imagine this thing would have a body quite similar to that of the earliest synapsids, which lived during the permian..... larger arms and thorax of course.

Can't complain about critique much except that I find the area in the right upper corner a bit wierd but contrast wise it works out anyway and looks nice.

Very interesting anatomy on this one, I always find animals with a bigger lower jaw wierd (althrough a much bigger upper jaw looks wierd to me, too).

It must've had some tough predetors or prey to have evolved an exoskeleton with that size (on the other hand, you have to be kind of insane/stupid to evolve your delicious meat around your skeleton instead of inside it, that's just asking for it )

Must really hurt if it accidently bites in it's tongue through

Anyway, great piece and nice creature design (would like to see the miniature)! Would love to see more of the body or how it looks from other angles althrough this way wondering about how it would look is also nice

I reckon such sites as DA, Twitter, Tumblr and what not would help me to get more popular with the "pixel"/low-res/8-bit crowd, but I don't feel safe there.I might will start to post stuff on these sites one day though.

But for now, I rather stay with this great community full of people I really like.

I never use NPA stuff as underpaintings. I always begin with compiling a palette I think could fit the topic and then start straight up pixelling. First, I fill the canvas with one of the mid-tones and then lay down the strongest shadows with my darkest colour.

I see what you mean, but I have to disagree on that it is not what I intented. The red is only there for balancing the quite cool colours of the rest of the palette. It has been my intention to leave the shadow barely visible in order to give it a green/blueish overall look.

But you are right about that a softer transition with a more neutral colour and brighter red would enhance the balance... if it wasn't for the ice planet theme though. ;)